Thursday 8 December 2011

Art and Integration

Recently I had the pleasure of visiting MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, one of the beacons of culture in Tasmania.

Built into a hill with sheer rock walls and a dizzying collection including ancient Mesopotamian tablets, paintings by Australian greats and modernist sculptures and installations, it was clearly meant to impress. Informed by an avante-garde sensibility, MONA had the flavour of something one might find in Berlin or New York.

After walking through its many levels in cavernous semi-darkness, I pondered the meaning of the experience. Many of the works, particularly the more recent, were about sex and death. There was an element of shock to them, a purposeful desire by the artist to confront the viewer with what lurks in the Shadow.

This is obviously not new in art - consider Caravaggio's brutal, sexual paintings in the 17th century, through to the modern day with Dada, Surrealism and all the rest. The artist is a transgressor, pushing the boundaries of culture and society, challenging the norms of acceptability. Working functionally, this approach renews society by cutting through its stale and restrictive forms and opens the door for new, life-affirming possibilities. It also exposes underlying issues with the hope of change. Chaim Potok's novel My Name is Asher Lev explores these dynamics beautifully. The artistic soul of the main character, Asher Lev, demands the creation of a crucifixion painting that is taboo in his rigid, ultra-orthodox Jewish community. The painting symbolises the inner torment and hope for redemption in the psyche of his community. The artist holds the seed for change.

There is also a dysfunctional side to the artist as transgressor in which shock is elevated as a goal; boundaries are broken for the sake of merrely doing so, not in the service of a broader context. The artist disgorges whatever is in the unconscious, without proper discrimination or maturity. At MONA one of the works on display was a framed photograph of a dog humping a naked man from behind.

I wondered whether integration/synthesis could be a valuable underlying idea or goal in art. That is, the aim is not so much breaking boundaries as playing with boundaries so that they dissolve and a new whole is created; not so much confrontation and discord as unity and new life; and not so much shock as something that, while it may be challenging, is also deeply pleasing - not in a conservative, anodyne way, but in a way that nourishes the soul. As an example I think of the work of Melbourne artist Godwin Bradbeer, whose black and white figurative drawings convey a depth and mystery that is difficult to put into words. Images of faces and bodies appear on a black background, dreamlike and incorporeal as form emerges from nothingness. There is little that is shocking or subversive, just a numinous reverence for the human body and the mystery of creation.

So too I think the poetry of Mary Oliver is an example of art that aims for integration and wholeness, not merely the breaking of forms. In exploring the joy and suffering of life, Oliver seeks an underlying unity, meaning that can tie all experience together. What comes through is a celebratory wisdom immersed in nature as the path to soul. In her poem Sunrise (from Dream Work, 1986) she writes of climbing a hill at dawn and feeling the light that shines across the world:

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

Beyond art, integration/synthesis can act as a template or overarching idea for culture and society as a whole. Human exploration, still largely rooted in individual gain and ego achievement, can have at its centre "the many that are one", where one person's quest is that of the entire human race and the planet as a whole. The adventure of life is undertaken not merely for oneself, but mindfully for all, for "the liberation of all beings" as Buddhists like to say. This would mean the entrance of a level of mysticism into human self-understanding and require a shift of foucus, a leap in consciousness. It seems to me that Bradbeer, Oliver and many others are laying the foundations. Wide cracks are opening in the materialistic world order that currently dominates, and as economic, social and environmental crises deepen, we are being called to new vision. Perhaps T.S Eliot had something like this in mind when he wrote the following in the final stanza of his great work, Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.